n an essay for The Times about Oscar Wilde, Ackroyd writes, "if he was a genius, he was one because he came to embody the obsessions of his own period. . . . [B]ut it was both his blessing and his eventual tragedy that the age itself might most aptly be termed fin de si&egrave;cle."

"What I would like to explore is how Wilde managed to fuse the actual physical techniques used in the visual arts with his own literary techniques and preoccupations. This is in part beyond theoretical concerns of influences and sources, and is paramount to an understanding of Wilde’s conception of literature and the fundamental way he conceived the novel and the direction he wanted it to take. This essay will focus upon the Wildean preoccupation with both movement and growth, and more specifically upon how the writer succeeds where the painter does not. Wilde was not interested in redefining the limits of literature and the visual arts, but in establishing once and for all, the ascendancy of the former over the latter. As he stated in the quotation above, movement was not the problem of literature but of painting, literature being boundless in its potential."